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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I am not a game dev and do not have a stake in this personally but also dislike the ‘lazy or incompetent dev’ line that gets used sometimes. While ALOT of games seem to be made with really shitty code, with a game that seems as complex as Helldivers 2 adding a new feature can be a lot more complex than expected.

    First there are non-technical factors: bosses that might not want to implement the feature and needs to be convinced, the devs might not know how to implement it and need to do research which takes time, artists that need to be added to the pipeline for assets, budget or other financial concerns (management might not think the feature will contribute to revenue), or even something like petty internal politics.

    One the side of technical problems there is combinatorial explosion where adding ONE feature means thinking about how it interacts with all the other features. There is the problem of possible technical debt where you might inherit bad code from previous devs that you need to change before you can add anything. There is also the problem that the feature might not be technically feasible; remember that a game has only a fraction of a second to do its calculations and display them to the player while also checking for player input. This does not even begin to consider the problems caused by being a multiplayer game with possible network problems.

    On the discontinued engine, the studio founder said that they were already in development of Helldivers 2 when it was discontinued according to the Wikipedia article.









  • With how much hype I saw online I thought they had improved on the systems from from DOS 1 but in a lot of ways it feels worse.

    The new initiative system means it makes no sense to invest points into it since no matter how high it is, your enemies will get to go first.

    In my first attempt at playing I tried to have a varied team that can do different types of damage but the new armour system made that useless. The only thing that matter is getting as much raw damage as possible. Most of the interesting effects only apply once you take down all the enemy armour. This also make most traps useless since you can walk right through without any I’ll effects.

    But the thing that irritated me the most was the inventory. It’s slow and annoying to use and so I decided to try the official mod. After using it to sort all of my inventory into specific bags I found out that you cannot trade or craft using anything that was put into those bags. At that point I just started a new game.

    Now on my new game I am getting bored with how slow the fights are. This isn’t helped by the unintuitive puzzles and the weirdly toned story.